The Nitty Gritty Details

Many of you have already heard the news, but some of you haven't. This has all come to be so quickly and without notice, so please forgive us if you haven't heard yet!!! Sorry this is such a novel, but it's such an amazing story, we wanted to give you the details! If you don't want to read the novel, scroll down the the next posts for the basic details! :-)

Thursday afternoon, we got a call through our toll free number from an anonymous woman asking if we were still interested in adopting and if Michigan was too far away. I replied that it was fine and that yes, we were still hoping to adopt. She asked if she could text our number to her daughter's friend who happened to be in labor at the hospital at the time! I told her we would be happy to have her do so! However, I sort of just thought I would never hear from anyone about it again.

Boy, was I wrong! About ten minutes later, I got a call from the girl in the hospital in labor! She told me she was dilated to a 5 and wanted to know if we were interested in adopting the baby. I told her we certainly would be! I asked if she had ever seen a picture of us or our profile or anything and she said no. We pieced together later that the birth mother's friend just found us and thought we would be a good family for the baby! I asked if she wanted to know a little about us and she said she guessed she would so I just told her the basics -- our ages, that we live in AZ, and that Shane is an electrical engineer while I am a stay-at-home momma to my son, Carter, who just turned three. I told her we have an open adoption with our son's birth momma and she said she would want it completely closed. I said we would respect her wishes but that we'd want her to get in touch with us through the agency if she ever wanted contact and we'd welcome it. She basically said she just wanted to know how soon we could get there and I realized she just wanted to pick us without any more discussion! I told her I'd have my caseworker call her right away. I called our caseworker and she was almost to the agency. She called me back a few minutes later, I gave her the information, and she called the girl in the hospital after she arrived at the agency. Long story short, I was on and off the phone the rest of the night as they tried to get an LDS Family Services case worker to the hospital and we began to look at flights and make arrangements in case we really were going to do this!

As you can imagine, it was a stressful but exciting time! We ended up hearing from the caseworker, Doug, at around 10:00 pm AZ time and he informed us that the baby girl had been born around 10:00 Eastern time (3 hour difference) and he had finally met with the mother and he said she really wanted to place the baby and wanted us to get there ASAP. We agreed it was best for us to fly out the next morning at 6:00 am in order to arrive at 1:00 pm in Detroit.

That we did! We arranged for Carter to have a babysitter in the morning and then to stay with Joe and Claudia this week. Another caseworker picked us up from the Detroit airport and took us to the hospital where Doug was already meeting with the hospital social worker, Gina. We nervously waited half an hour just outside the doors of the nursery, knowing our girl was in there -- talk about torture!!! When Doug finally came out to get us, he said the birth mother was there and willing to meet us just for a few minutes, but we couldn't take any pictures. We walked in and there she was! We hugged and chatted for a few minutes. We told her how grateful we were she was willing to meet and how grateful we are for her placing the baby with us. We told her we'd always love, honor and respect her and asked if there was anything she wanted the baby to know. She said just that she wanted to find a good family to love and take care of her and she was so glad we came so fast to be there. We promised we'd love and care for her always and we'd teach her that her birth mother placed her in love and wanted the best for her. And then she was gone.

When Gina the hospital social worker came back from seeing the sweet birth mom out, she asked if we had seen the baby yet and we said NO, and we're DYING to! She took our drivers licenses and copied them for the baby's file and then got us into the nursery and brought our little angel baby over to us with the back of her head facing us! She had some brown hair and that was all we could tell! Well then she turned her around and we saw the most beautiful little face with petite, feminine, sweet features...just beautiful! And she looked to us like her amazing birth mother! She was just peaceful and calm and content and pursed her perfect, ruby red little lips in the cutest way when she stretched! Her most prominent features right away were her cute little up-turned nose and the cleft in her chin. We were blown away by her perfection and could finally see what our baby looked like. Until then, it was so hard to imagine what she might look like since we didn't meet her birth family ahead of time.

Another long story made short: for the next three hours we just took turns holding her and falling in love even more with her, even though we were instantly smitten from the first moment!

We had not eaten all day and it was 6:00 pm, so we finally left and went to check in at the hotel and eat dinner. We went back over to the hospital via the hotel shuttle after dinner though because we couldn't stand being away from her! We stayed until just before the shuttle service ended for the night and reluctantly left her again.

One other thing to mention is that we had decided on the way to Detroit that we liked Lucy, Leila, and Molly as names and then after meeting the baby, we kept trying to make one of those names work and none of them seemed to fit at the end of our first day with her. So we went online and tried to look at names to find out if there were any other names we liked that we'd forgotten about. We were hoping her name would jump right out at us and IT DID! I saw Ruby on the list of the 1,000 most popular names form 2008 and I instantly knew that was her name. I told Shane as we pulled up a picture of her on the computer and he got a big grin on his face. We both knew that fit her perfectly! We had been told at the hospital that the baby's birth mother chose to name her Jane Lyn. We already loved Jane for a middle name and Ruby Jane was just right for her!

Because we only got a single hour of sleep the night we found out about the baby (Thursday night), we ended up sleeping until 11:30 this morning! We got to the hospital by 2:00 and stayed with our precious Ruby Jane until around 8:00 pm. We had the shuttle take us to Target to get a few baby girl things we thought we might need if they discharge her tomorrow, and then we came to the hotel. We are just feeling SO blessed! We even had a little bonus miracle tonight and feel even more thrilled!

Okay, I know it was long, but there is the story so far. We are not sure if we will get home soon or not. MI law is very difficult for adoptive families and I heard today about a family that was here from out of state for a couple months! The good news is, the agency and the attorney will do everything they can to use AZ documents and get us out of Michigan ASAP. Best-case scenario would probably put us headed back to AZ by the end of this coming week. Please join us in praying that things can be expedited and they will accept the AZ documents and we can get Ruby home to meet her big brother, and Ruby's birth mom can have the placement taken care of and focus on moving on.

Thank you, all of you, for all the thoughts and prayers and well-wishes! We just feel like we are in an alternate universe right now and can hardly believe the good fortune and blessings we are experiencing!